It’s hard sometimes to encapsulate everything that is wonderful about your firm, especially if you’re in an industry that has a lot of complicated aspects. Talking about health care can be tricky, for instance: People don’t like to think about being sick, and if they get sick, they may not feel like talking numbers. Discussing legal needs isn’t sexy, at least not until someone needs an attorney, but planning ahead can head off any number of issues. And talking details about tech changes can be quite dry, especially without some sort of humanizing or "wow" factor.

That humanizing factor is crucial to creating engagement. Without it, your company is a collection of stats and services, lacking any means for your audience to connect with what you do, much less why they should care that you can do it. To help your brand develop its voice and following, members from Forbes Communications Council suggest trying the following approaches:

Photos courtesy of the individual members

Members share a few ways you can improve your brand's reach.

1. Communicate Emotional Benefits To Lay Groundwork

Health care is boring, complicated and kind of a bummer to think about, which is why we don't focus on products, features or competitive differentiators in our top-of-funnel brand marketing. Instead, we try to communicate simplicity and the positive, life-affirming results of health care — namely, that you're happily living your life and not thinking about your health. For abstract financial products or confusing terminology, we've found over-emphasizing the human-centric and emotional-end benefits builds the trust we need to deliver the technical product details when the consumer is ready to listen. - Dave Matli, Parasail Health

A brand based on values works to some degree, but we've found an alternative strategy that has produced three times the impact. Winning corporate brands provide audiences with personal benefits. They help audiences feel better about themselves — not the company — and drive significantly higher levels of preference than those that don’t. - Karl Schmidt, CEB is now Gartner

Consumer interest in the legal industry can be underwhelming. We're constantly trying new and creative ways to share legal stories or everyday legal issues in a compelling light. For the past two years, we conducted an annual relationship study that covered topics ranging from divorce to how couples think about money, and then partnered with renowned sociologist Dr. Pepper Schwartzon media tours. The result: hundreds of media hits that positioned us as the go-to legal, and legal research, resource. - Jennifer Shernoff, Avvo